When to Keep Querying and When to Revise

You’re querying – hurray! You send your lovingly written and edited manuscript out into the world—

And you get crickets.

Or you get rejections.

Or you get the raised hopes of full requests – and then rejections.

If it’s early days in your querying journey, hold on for now. But if you are a few months in, it’s easy to feel disheartened, and not know what to do next. Do you keep querying? After all, rejections are subjective, and you only need that one agent who loves your book like you do. Do you revise the manuscript – and if so, how? Do you need big structural changes, or improvements on a line level? Or do you put the manuscript in a metaphorical drawer and move on to a new project for now?

Here is what your agent responses might look like in each of these situations, so you can try and work out the best next steps for your manuscript.

You’re getting full requests – multiple – and agents are sending personalised feedback based on their full reads, but there’s no clear thread appearing across all these rejections. The feedback might be specific – I wanted Jane to have a clearer motive for pursuing Craig – or vague – I didn’t feel passionately enough to make an offer – but there’s no single issue coming up again and again that you could work on.

Here, I would keep querying for now. There’s nothing for you to work on in those vague rejections – it just wasn’t the right book for that agent – nor anything you can pull out to work on that multiple agents have suggested is an issue. If everyone had the same problem, you would want to work on that, but you can’t make changes that only one person who doesn’t want the book anyway has pointed out.

The caveat here is that you will get to a point where it’s time to stop. If you get a lot of requests very quickly, from a high proportion of the agents you query, but no offers – you might decide to look hard at the structure of your novel before you do another round of queries. Similarly, if you have sent out a large number of queries, had full requests but no offers, you are going to get to a point where you might want to park this novel for now, and decide that the market just isn’t there at the moment.

But the bottom line is that if you are getting full requests with personalised feedback that isn’t all pointing out one fatal flaw – you can feel confident that your novel is in good shape.